Torrent Meltdown Options

[Harkonnen]

• More than 50% of torrents tracked through the Pirate Bay
• If shut down, remaining trackers will fail if forced to take over the slack of directing 20 million concurrent connections
• Torrent filesharing in its current scale grinds to a halt

• 50-80% of global internet traffic in bulk data estimated to be torrent packets

So, when the Pirate Bay shuts down, effectively up to 80% of packets whipping around the internet will dry up? Is there a flaw in my logic train here? This just seems like it could be a massive event to internet infrastructure but I haven't really heard much about it.

[Ithuriel]

I think those traffic staistic are completely bullshit, The amount of other traffic on the internet is staggering. There is no way torrents can attribute that much data when you start to think about all the huge fiber links to coperations, Banks, Research labs, ISPs etc... Your saying they're all using torrents?

[wolfmother]

I think those traffic staistic are completely bullshit, The amount of other traffic on the internet is staggering. There is no way torrents can attribute that much data when you start to think about all the huge fiber links to coperations, Banks, Research labs, ISPs etc... Your saying they're all using torrents?

While the other traffic on the internet is indeed staggering in its volume, in reality, consumer bandwidth on the internet is oversold - it HAS to be for the internet to work. If every consumer connection on the internet tried to connect to every other consumer connection on the internet, the total bandwidth being consumed would dwarf the bandwidth of all those professional servers - and that's exactly what torrents do. The way it plays out is just the nature of scale-free networks combined with the fact that at any given time 90% of consumer links are barely being used.

Why do you think DDOS works so well? The ratio of consumers to servers is probably something like 1000:1, and that means that all you need is 1000 zombies with "normal" connections and you can take down the average webserver (shared hosting notwithstanding).